For business owner who absolutely hates designing emails, you literally stare at that screen for hours on end and then just nothing happens. This video is for you and I’m gonna give you five tips to help you go through the design process a little bit easier. And I’m gonna show you example just as knowing how to use email temp plates and high smile are a great example of this.
You’ll notice that every time they release a new product, they have the same flow, which is a hero image with a CTA. They go into some native text, and they also drop into a secondary CTA. But for every content pillar that you have in email, so this is a product highlight, you could have sale blogs back. I can stop new arrivals, limited collection. All of this is gonna depend on your business. But for every type of content pillar, you should have a different email temple plate. You simply just go into that email template and then just drag and drop the elements around, change the imagery out, change the native text, and then you have a new design. This then brings me into number two, which is why white space. And this is the one that’s going to take your emails from okay and good to great. There’s a proximity design principle that says elements that are closer together are seen as related parts. So by spreading out different areas to make it easier for the subscriber to read will make them digest the information quicker.
This email behind me is a bad example of that. You can see that everything is very tight here and it’s very hard to know where to look and what to read first. This design here is a good example. We have the image at the top here, and then we go into native text. But there is a very clear margin on top of the text and below the CTA button, which makes it very easy for you to get the information quickly and scan. This then falls into No. 3 perfectly, which is your email copy should always be to the point and precise as possible.
You want your hero message to speak to directly what’s happening in the email. And especially when you first open the email, you need to speak to that straight away. You don’t want sub headings and little text bars. You want to tell them exactly what is in the email. All of your text should be easily scannable.
No. 4 is imagery. And this is important because this is going to determine how quickly your emails are loaded. The width of your images should be 900 pixels. Now I find this to be a happy medium that works perfectly for desktop and mobile. I do find that 600 pixels wide is great for mobile, but it can look a little bit pixelated on desktop. So 900 is a great place to start when it comes to the length of your images. Obviously, it’s gonna depend on exactly what is in the images, but I would try and keep the length of my images at a maximum of 1,100 pixels. But obviously trying to break up your images wherever you can because it’s just going to help with load time rather than loading one long image which may not even load, you wanna aim to keep your images under 1 megabyte. Gifts are a great addition to any email because they really pull attention, but just keep it minimal, one per email. And you need to keep it under 5 megabytes, much less if you can. And the last tip is your CTA button, your call to action button, like this green one here below. When you open up an email, you need your CTA button to be above the fold, meaning that I shouldn’t have to go scrolling to find your CTA button. It needs to be very accessible on the eye and easily to pick up from the whole design. So it has to pop out of the screen. Contrasting colors work really well, but making sure that it doesn’t fade into the background of your design. And to be honest, it all starts with email temp plates. If you have good email templates, all your white space, all your CTA buttons, everything is already looked after. Your headings are in the places that they need to be. So you’re not designing from scratch every single time. If you go to the top of my page, I have an email design toolkit there that you’ll probably be obsessed with. It’s all done in Canva and it’s really there just to help you understand email design, get your email templates and pillars ready so that you know what you’re doing. You’re not just designing ad hoc email designs.